A gifted composer of minimalist yet deeply eloquent spirit-healing music, Deuter has been making music for decades, often turning to the sounds of ocean waves and flowing water to provide the perfect semi-anchored sense of drifting. The one hand-clapping root of rootless spirit provides a gentle yet strong, unceasing mellow flow to his music. His minimalism gets so minimal that it just fades away for Ocean Waves, which Deuter recorded in the French seaside towns of Nice and Cannes, the mystic island of Bali, and Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands.

Capturing the surf in different environments and times of day, the album roars with the rushing tides of Nice, calms with the tranquil splashes against the pier and water rushing over sand at Lanzarote, ascends in the misty spraying tide of Bali—where you can practically hear each grain of crystalline sand sing in delight as warm water rushes over it—and the splashy crashes and slouchy retreats of the surf in Cannes recall nothing so much as a big, sloppy loving dog rushing up to lick your toes. While some may be expecting a gentle three-note flute or synthesizer melody to slowly materialize in the spray of these oceanic sounds, it never does. Musicians are welcome to add their own, of course, and play along over the waves for a restful counterpoint, but for the rest of us perhaps that expectation can work to form a nice gateway into deeper states of relaxed meditation and awareness of the moment, facilitating the ultimate surrender into the loving arms of spiritual bliss. The deeper and closer we listen we hear the subtleties and energy flows of these sounds, which are brilliantly and patiently recorded to allow every last spritz of salty spray and gush of inward tide, and every deep drag back out to sea, its personal voice.

Everything merges into an unceasing flow in Deuter's microphone and spacious recording panorama. We can listen deeply enough to hear our own primordial birth out of the chaotic soup of the sea, our early days as a microbe swimming so small and helpless in the vast universal tide, the long process of becoming our present complicated selves seeming to have taken really no time at all. Time ceases to exist in the flow of the sea. There is only one wave, it comes it goes, but in its constant change is never changing. In knowing this, as the Upanishads say, the rest is known. Deuter knows.